


Somewhere Out There

by domesticadventures



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Established Relationship, Gen, Headspace, M/M, POV Dean Winchester, and not really knowing what to do with that, i don't even know how to tag this lol, it's just rambling about being a person who isn't From anywhere
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:14:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26112481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domesticadventures/pseuds/domesticadventures
Summary: When you’ve lived your life out of motel rooms in every state in the lower forty-eight, every place seems exactly as important as the other.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 19
Kudos: 139
Collections: The Destiel Fan Survey Favs Collection





	Somewhere Out There

**Author's Note:**

> saw [this post](https://domesticadventures.tumblr.com/post/627199031470407680) that’s been going around and was like Yeah and then this happened

Dean wonders, sometimes, what it’s like to be from somewhere.

The question has followed him his whole life. He has been asked it by all kinds of people, but most frequently by those he has taken to bed, during the initial few minutes of requisite small talk they managed while they conducted a different conversation with their eyes, their hands, their feet brushing together under the table.

“Kansas,” he said most often, and he accepted the skeptical looks, sometimes their intrusive questions, comments on how he defied whatever stereotype they had in their heads. He doesn’t know if he should be flattered by their compliments or embarrassed that they saw through his lie so easily.

And it does feel like a lie. He has a place he was born, of course, a place on a map he can point to, but Lawrence is little more than an idea -- his memories of it are vague at best, obscured by the blurry unreliability of childhood even when they aren’t also lost in the smoke and fire. Most of what he knows about his birthplace he knows from going back after the fact, from walking through the house that used to be his home and fact checking, asking himself, did I remember this right? Was that real?

He was born there, and he returned there -- knows Stull Cemetery better than he’d like -- but he didn’t grow up there. Even when he isn’t hunting the people who might have been his neighbors, he is a visitor there, a tourist, vacationing in other people’s lives. He can’t look at local landmarks and say, here’s where something happened to me that mattered, and I think of it every time I pass by. He can’t say, here’s my friend who’s known me my whole life, who can pull out an album and tell you the story that goes with each picture.

He wonders, how do you know who you are, when you don’t know where you’re from? There’s a person he was at five, at ten, at fifteen, that he doesn't know, that he can’t remember. He wants to ask, who was I then? But everyone he could ask is dead, except for Sam, and Sam only knows that younger version of him as brother, as caregiver, as someone unwilling to break away from their transient life, someone unwilling to be as angry at their father as Sam wanted. He wants to know who else he was, and he doesn’t have anyone to ask.

\--

“Around,” he would say, with a tilt of his head and a smile, playing coy when he thought it might work. And it did, maybe more often than it should have. Maybe the dash of truth in it helped.

He isn’t from anywhere because he’s from everywhere. He has spent so much of his life on the road that he knows the freeways like the backs of his hands, can map you a route from one major city to another from memory. He knows that of all the interstate highways, the stretch of I-10 through Texas feels the longest, just like he knows he’ll flag himself as an outsider there if he prefaces the names of the freeways with “the” like they do in California.

But once you get to the city streets, he needs Google Maps just like anyone else. He remembers, for that stretch of time he lived with Lisa and Ben, how she would drive around Cicero on its winding back roads so automatically and effortlessly that it had seemed like magic to him.

Most of that year had seemed like magic, actually, something wild and unfamiliar, ready to slip out of his control as soon as he loosened his grip, as soon as he misspoke. He’d had a circle of almost-friends, people he was friendly with but who did not know him, who never really could, he made sure of it. They would invite him to barbecues, to movie nights, to superbowl parties, and he would look at their enthusiasm in bewilderment as they cheered on their teams. He understood it, their fervent love, but only in the abstract, in theory. He gets how you could care about something like that, feel attached to a name and a color scheme after watching it your whole life, how you could feel invested in those outcomes.

But when you don’t have that, how do you choose? When you’ve lived your life out of motel rooms in every state in the lower forty-eight, every place seems exactly as important as the other. He may as well throw a dart at a map and root for the teams from whichever place he most cleanly skewers.

It was only after he left that he realized he was wrong. He does have places of particular significance, of course, not just Cicero but also Lawrence, Sioux Falls, the Roadhouse. He just wonders what it says about him, that the only important places he can point to, the ones where he made some of his happiest memories, also played host to most of his trauma. Who are you, when that ambivalence is the only home you know?

\--

“Nowhere,” he would say, shrugging, hating what felt like the blunt honesty of it. Sometimes, they would take his tone as a dismissal. Others, they would take it as a challenge.

“You ever think about the fact that we’re not from anywhere?” Dean says, glancing over at Sam from the driver’s seat. “Not really, I mean. Not in any way that matters, not in a way where it feels like you know a place and it knows you.”

Sam huffs a laugh. “Where is this coming from?”

“Well,” Dean says, “what do you say, when people ask where you’re from?”

“Lebanon,” Sam says, shrugging. “Or just Kansas.”

“Huh. Not Lawrence?”

“No,” Sam says. “I don’t even remember it, not from when we were kids. It would feel weird to claim it now, I guess.”

“So, what, you just give them the place you’ve stayed the longest?”

Sam goes very quiet and still, looks out the window so he doesn’t have to meet Dean’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Finally, he says, “I try not to think about where I’ve stayed the longest.”

It takes Dean a second before he gets it, and when he does, he needs to take a moment to do an unreal sort of math, to realize that, as of his last birthday, he has at last spent more time here than in hell, that that particular scale has finally tipped in his favor. For Sam, it never will.

“We’re not from there,” Dean says, hands twisting around the wheel. “We’ll claim this whole damn country as ours if we have to, we’ll claim the whole world. But we’re not from there.”

\--

Sometimes people ask him--

“What is it like,” Dean asks, turning to face Cas across the pillows, “to be from somewhere?”

Cas closes his book, sets it aside. When he shifts towards Dean, he’s frowning a little, squinting in that way he has, thoughtful. “I’m not sure I know what you’re asking.”

“What’s it like, you know, to live somewhere for millennia. To belong there.”

Cas gives him a look -- not offended, really, but gently puzzled, sort of like he thinks Dean is making a joke at his expense, or like he’s being a bit dense. “Is that what you think? That I belonged there?”

Dean’s face flushes as he realizes what exactly it is he’s just said. He forgets, sometimes, everything that’s happened to get to moments like these, this slow, unremarkable evening in bed before they tuck in for the night. In his defense, it’s a lot for one person to remember. “Sorry,” he says. “I guess not.”

Cas doesn’t look upset, though, just a little distant, a little lost in his own thoughts. “I wanted to, though,” he says, focusing back on Dean. “For a long time. Maybe some part of me still does. I don’t want to go back, but I still miss it sometimes. Is that strange?”

“No,” Dean says. “No, I don’t think it is. I think that’s it, actually. I wish I knew what that was like, you know? To miss a place like that, instead of just, I don’t know, missing the idea of it.”

“Ah,” Cas says. Dean can practically see him replaying the conversation in his head, putting pieces together. “You feel like you aren’t from anywhere?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, relieved that Cas has gotten there without needing the explanation, as he so frequently does nowadays. “I dunno. It feels like it should be a simple question with a simple answer, but it just...isn’t.”

“Mmm.” Cas reaches over, lays his hand over Dean’s, runs his thumb across his knuckles. “Well, maybe the question just isn’t one that allows for your complexity.”

Dean snorts. “Don’t make it sound romantic.”

“I mean it,” Cas says. “Given the life you’ve lived, how could you have just one answer? You may have a place you’re from originally, but that isn’t the only thing that’s shaped you. To get to who you are now, you had to go through all the other places, too.”

“You speaking from experience?”

“You know that I am.”

They’re silent for a moment, and Dean thinks maybe that’s it, maybe that’s the end of the conversation, but then Cas’ hand stills. He says, “Anyway, you’re conflating things. You’re trying to find meaning in where someone is from. But just because you’re from somewhere doesn’t mean you belong there, and vice versa. You know that as well as I do.”

“So, what?” Dean says. “There isn’t an answer?”

“I didn’t say that,” Cas says, and then he shifts, lets go of Dean’s hand to reach out instead. He trails his thumb across Dean’s cheek, slips his hand around behind his neck, down his back. Dean moves easily, willingly, sliding closer until he’s flush against Cas, head tucked under his chin.

“What  _ are  _ you saying, then?”

Cas presses a kiss to the top of his head. “Maybe you’re just asking the wrong question.”

\--

Dean is from a lot of places. He’s from Lawrence, Kansas, and from a bunker a few miles outside Lebanon. He’s from Cicero, Indiana and Sioux Falls, South Dakota and the Roadhouse that once existed on the back roads of Nebraska. He’s from a thousand places across the United States, small towns whose names he doesn’t remember, city streets and country roads he needs help to navigate and freeways he doesn’t. He’s from hell, like it or not, and from purgatory, and a little bit from heaven, too. It’s a long list.

But there’s another list to be made, one he’s still working on because the items on it are harder to identify, because they can’t be pointed out on a globe or entered into Google. They have to be mapped out over a lifetime.

Dean is asking himself where he belongs, and making a list of the answers:

In the Impala, driving somewhere or nowhere, preferably with someone he loves in the passenger seat.

Seated around the dinner table with his family, a meal he made laid out in front of them.

In those precious moments after a successful hunt, sweaty and dirty and alive.

Making Sam soup when he’s sick and making fun of his hair when he’s not.

Wrapped in a hug by a friend he hasn’t seen in a while.

Curled around Cas in their bed.

Here.

**Author's Note:**

> [here's](https://domesticadventures.tumblr.com/post/627463038613815296/) a rebloggable version on tumblr if that's your thing!


End file.
